This is a blog about economics, history, law and other things that interest me.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

More new "history" of capitalism

Sven Beckert has an essay in the Chronicle Review, markting his new book.

Historians “observe,
quite rightly, that the world we live in cannot be understood without coming to
terms with the long history of capitalism—a process that has arguably unfolded
over more than half a millennium. They are further encouraged by the
all-too-frequent failings of
economists, who have tended to naturalize particular economic
arrangements by defining the "laws" of their development with
mathematical precision and preferring short-term over long-term perspectives.”

The need to offer some vague critique of economics in everything
they write is one of the most tiresome features of the new historians of
capitalism. I suggest that he take a look at some of the work by economists
that examines the influence of differences in institutions and endowments on
long term economic performance: North, Sokolof and Engerman, and Nunn would be
good places to start.

“What distinguishes
today’s historians of capitalism is that they insist on its contingent nature,
tracing how it has changed over time as it has revolutionized societies,
technologies, states, and many if not all facets of life.”

Who does this distinguish them from? Business historians have
frequently made such distinctions, writing about proprietary capitalism and
managerial capitalism, or just varieties of capitalism. Or, consider the work
on the evolution of monopoly capitalism by Marxist scholars. Most of the work by new institutional economic historians is about how capitalist economies have differed from place to place and eveolved over time.

“For too long, many
historians saw no problem in the opposition between capitalism and slavery.
They depicted the history of American capitalism without slavery, and slavery
as quintessentially noncapitalist. Instead of analyzing it as the modern
institution that it was, they described it as premodern.

Some scholars have always
disagree with such accounts. In the 1930s and 1940s, C.L.R. James and Eric
Williams argued for the centrality of slavery to capitalism, though their
findings were largely ignored. Nearly half a century later, two American
economists, Stanley L. Engerman and Robert William Fogel, observed in their
controversial book Time on the Cross (Little, Brown, 1974) the modernity and
profitability of slavery in the United States. Now a flurry of books and conferences are building
on those often unacknowledged foundations.”

Why don’t the people doing the new history of capitalism start acknowledging
these foundations?